THE NAKED SOUL.

Matteo Linguiti is a photographer and a professional apnea diver. The combination of this two skills let him plunge into the abyss of human nature, take pictures, and come back to surface. We met Matteo one evening in our studio. He showed us some cool stuff: fashion backstage videos, nightscapes and HDR shots. After closing the Macbook’s lid, he paused and smiled. “I have to show you something” he said, rummaging in his backpack. He took off a big book. “This has been my project for the last three years. I travel a lot for work, so it took me a while to edit all the material. Basically this is a collection of women I asked to take their clothes off and pose for me, naked.” The peculiar part of this project is that Matteo never met them before. All of them were complete strangers to him (and viceversa, of course). The deal was a three-hour shooting at his place. Then bye bye. No swapping of phone numbers or email. No strings attached. Nothing. Just a fragment of life, shared between photographer and model. Matteo recorded the women’s freewheeling talk during the shooting, so that portraits could be accompanied by their confession. It’s a train of thoughts expressed in loud voice, where images and words, to ensure intimacy, are shuffled so not to match each others. Matteo is looking forward to publish his book which collects hundreds of women and their stories; a work on anthropology, solitude, desperation and an urge for love, more than an essay on nudity. We wish him good luck.